The Native Home of Hope

Authenticity is not a fad when it comes to sense of place,  but use - or should I say misuse – of the word has become one.

This will pass, and when it does the attributes of authenticity of place will remain by definition nearly temporal.

My personal story begins as the only son of an only son, born at the tail end of five generations of Rocky Mountain ranchers who gradually migrated during the hundred years before I was born from the Central to the Northern Rockies.

Our ancestral ranch is where I learned sense of place, e.g. the smell of sage brush, new mown hay, and rain on a dirt road, as well as the sound of a Meadowlark and the colors of Yellowstone Cutthroat in the Henry’s Fork.

But it is also where I first learned about myths: including myths about rugged individualists, the cowboy errant Knight and other stereotypes of the West that I see fleeting across the eyes of people who want to hear my story.

I didn’t read Wallace Stegner until I came across his incredible essay in my early 30s entitled, Sense of Place.  This is where he coined that term and I still recommend to anyone seeking an understanding of authenticity.

It was my daughter, then in her third year of college, who brought me to Stegner in more depth.  Having heard my story, she knew that the breadth and depth of his writings would resonate.  It is such a gift to be understood.

One of my favorites is a book of essays written over a span that covered my first two decades entitled, The Sound of Mountain Water.  The first was published the year before I was born, the last in the collection as I turned 21.

The namesake essay in the book is a lyrical description about my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho and its famed Henry’s Fork including this resonate memoir from his first visit there in 1920:

“I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river…”

It is a myth though that the west was settled by rugged individualists.

While that characteristic was prevalent, in several of his books, Stegner supports, as he does in one of the essays in The Sound of Mountain Water, that “cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves” the American West.

When all but two lines of my ancestors crossed the Rockies, to be followed by the remaining two within a decade, there were fewer than 90,000 people inhabiting 750,000 square miles (twice the area of Western Europe.)

There were fewer than 70,000 along the Rockies, nearly all living in what are now New Mexico and Arizona.

Even after the Gold Rush and the arrival of 11,000 Mormons by 1850, the entire West when my ancestors settled there was less than 1% of the US population at the time.

Ranches required an average of four square miles or 2,500 acres, so to avoid isolation and provide safety and shared resources, much of the West was settled on what is called a “village and square model.”

It’s also why early jurisdictions for governance there relied more on river basins and watersheds for boundaries.

Predominately, during the fifty years prior to 1890 as the West was won ranchers lived in settlements near craftsmen, artisans, granaries and supply depots and commuted out to their land and livestock.

Sometimes historians also refer to this as a “village-farm system.”

Much of what is depicted in novels and movies about the West as well as that depicted by many of those who profess to be westerners today is synthetic.

Pure and simple, the West evolved to what it is today through a sense of commons that revolutionized the sense of land and water ownership.

The myth of rugged self-reliance became evident during the 1930’s Great Depression.

Groups such as Mormon leaders felt their recently evolved welfare program would be sufficient and pressed by partisans expressed that somehow the new federal program which emulated it would create sloth and dependency.

But the Mountain states where Mormons were then centered became the largest per capita users of the federal aid program.  Mormon leaders marveled at the public works projects completed by those receiving it as a condition.

Given their history, they shouldn’t have been at all surprised.

Apparently, they had forgotten that it is trust that led to economic development of the West, just as a new study has found in a study of survivors of Atomic bombs that trust enabled them to rebuild from that trauma.

Today, a small group of regressives in the West are pushing to let special interests get their hands on public lands for mining and drilling, backed quietly by Wall Street interests who have over the decades, raped the West in similar fashion.

They are dismissing economic analysis, which I have written about previously, showing that rural counties adjacent to public lands have outperformed others and that counties where resource exploitation occurs ultimately fall much lower.

But it was not the various gold, silver and copper strikes in the early west that provided sustainable growth.

It was grass.

In part, it was this unique, resilient, drought tolerant wild grass that led my ancestors who had settled in 1860 along each side of the Utah-Idaho border to relocate to the northern extreme of the Upper Snake River plain to create new homesteads along the Henry’s Fork.

Famously framed by the Continental Divide, Yellowstone and the Tetons, this area of my origin is the culmination of a hundred mile stretch that is no more than 70 miles wide at its widest narrowing to 20 or 30 miles where I was born.

The sides of this valley range to 10,000’ framed by the Lost River and Lemhi ranges stretching down from the Sawtooths and on the east by the Caribou, Snake River and Teton ranges.

My ancestors were following an old stagecoach supply route between Utah and the mines in Montana which, beginning in the late 1870s, was becoming the path of a slowly emerging railroad eventually to supply tourists to Yellowstone.

But above where the Henry’s Fork joined the South Fork to form the Snake River, settlers such as my ancestors were surprised to find the landscape covered not by sage brush, but waist high, wild bluegrass from the river to the Tetons and north to forests of the Centennial range.

The area had already been transited by trappers and then a cattle company but it was still available to homestead.  But they still followed the modified “village-farm and ranch” model adapted from when their parents cross the Rockies in the mid-1840s.

My ancestors found that the western side of the Henry’s Fork was even better adapted to ranching.  They had modified the village-ranch model but settled this new area as they had others in the West through cooperation.

Together, they marked off land, built bridges and roads, created reservoirs and irrigation canals, established granaries for the poor, created cemeteries and erected school houses.

Tough, independent and self-reliant – certainly – but with an even greater commitment to cooperation, the commons, public education and the welfare of those less fortunate.

By the time I was born in 1948, a hundred years after ancestors began settling the Rocky Mountain west,  rich potato farms had replaced the bluegrass in our nook of Idaho, as they have the ranchland on the west side now thanks to pivot irrigation systems.

The West is always changing.  Although I haven’t lived there since the 1970s, I travel along the Rockies each summer on road trips with my grandsons and daughter. 

Much more dramatic than the subtle land use changes since my youth are the demographic and psychographic changes.  Much of Idaho has been inhabited by in migration that seemingly seeks to replace the real Idaho by making it a refuge for the synthetic West.

I don’t mean the Aryan Nation which was expelled fifteen years ago.  Places in Idaho are exurbs such as Coeur d’Alene.  While whites represent only 8% of the population growth in the past decade, they represent 73% of the flight to exurbs.

Most seem to be chasing myths created when misinformation is re-harmonized to fit worldview.

It is complicated but emblematic.  The best way to understand why my homeland now seems foreign, click to watch an episode of the phenomenal PBS America By The Numbers program entitled Our Private Idaho.

As a fellow North Carolinian once wrote, “You Can Never Go Home Again,” and that is sad.  But the West will keep changing.

But as Stegner wrote, the West is also “the native home of Hope.”  My hope is that it will once again claim its authentic roots.

What Makes A Place “Real?”

Wallace Stegner wrote that “no place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry.”

I can imagine that, prior to his passing in 1993, he would have grumbled objection to my characterization that I firmly believe Stegner’s own “prose poetry” did just that for the Rocky Mountain region of my birth.

He is also often quoted by Scott Russell Sanders whose own prose queries the qualities that make a place “real.”

“What are the qualities of a real place, a distinctive place, a place with its own history, culture and texture? What qualities give certain places a feeling of character and charisma? What distinguishes the geography of somewhere, makes it worthy of a visitor’s deep engagement and a citizen’s love?”

Many years ago, I heard Sanders read in person a version of his published essay The Geography of Somewhere while I was sitting on the back row of the historic Elk’s Opera House just up a hill from the town square in Prescott (pronounced “press-cut”), Arizona on the mile-high highlands climbing up to the Grand Canyon.

The actions of many during the last session of the North Carolina General Assembly reminded us that a small faction, which fit conservative columnist David Brooks description of having “no moral decency,” could also care less “what makes a place real,” as they did whatever they could to surrender North Carolina’s environment and sense of place to their own special interests.

Unfortunately, while charged as guardians for sense of place, far too many destination marketing executives nationwide would either have been complicit or failing to grasp what makes a place “real,” would have idly sat on their hands.

As inspiration I share the following excerpts from Sander’s prose entitled The Geography of Somewhere (for those who shun reading, no illustration will suffice):

• “To begin with, a real place feels as though it belongs where it is, as though it has grown there, shaped by weather and geography, rather than being imported from elsewhere and set down arbitrarily like a mail-order kit.

• A real place is also distinguished by a vigorous local economy, one that draws on resources from the region [of the country] and on the skills of its own citizens. Key enterprises from factories to coffee shops, reflect the taste and judgment of the local people who own them, rather than the dictates of distant corporations.

• Visitors will know they have arrived in a real place…when they find in shops well-crafted articles whose makers live nearby, when they discover on restaurant menus dishes they could not order anywhere else…when artists choose not merely to live there but to photograph and paint it, to write and sing of it, when archaeologists and historians delve into its past; when naturalists keep track of the local flora and fauna; and when elders pass on all of this lore to the young.

• A real place…conveys a sense of temporal depth, a sense that people have been living and laboring here for a long time. The traces of earlier generations are preserved in festivals and folkways and habits of speech; in old buildings that have been restored and kept in service; in landscapes that are still devoted to orchards, dairies, woodlots and other traditional uses…While honoring the past, a real place is not trapped there.

• A real place keeps us mindful of nature, as it keeps us mindful of history. In the built environment one feels the presence of the living environment…Although we can’t all summon up spectacular settings for our home places, we can make the most of whatever nature gives us.

• In a genuine gathering place, people from all walks of life may argue and joke and swap stories and admire one another’s babies and sympathize with one another’s aches, all while feeling at home. Indeed, such gathering spots extend our sense of home beyond the four walls where we happen to sleep. The true wealth of a community shows up not in the grandeur of private residences or shopping emporiums but in the quality of libraries, schools, museums, parks, courthouses, galleries and other public arenas.

• What all of us long for, I suspect, is to love the places in which we live and live in places worthy of love…we hunger for integrity and authenticity.”

Memorial Afterthoughts

A month and 146 years ago as of June 1, according to documents discovered a decade or so ago in a Harvard archive, the first seedling for what we just observed as Memorial Day sprouted just less than a week after the surrender in Durham, NC that effectively ended the Civil War, and not several years later as previously thought.

Fittingly, this earliest precursor occurred in Charleston, SC during the final year of the conflict also known as the War Between The States that began there 150 years ago this past April. A year ago, Long-time Mayor Joseph P. Riley of that community dedicated a marker to commemorate the newly revealed memorial event.

It gives one goose-bumps to think of 10,000 former slaves and black Union troops marching silently, preceded by nearly 3,000 black children softly singing the anthem “John Brown’s Body”.

Reading the op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, as I hope everyone did or will, by David W. Blight, the Yale history professor who uncovered the story reminded me of his 2001 book, Race and Reunion where I believe I first read the account.

For some reason, the op-ed has also taken my thoughts this week back to the War of 1812 that ended the life of John Neeley.

He was one of only 2,260 American soldiers killed in action during that two-and-one-half year war, which was declared 199 years ago today, just 20 days shy of 24 years after ratification of The Constitution of the United States of America.

The year the American Revolutionary War ended, Neeley was born in the Village of Ovid, between the western New York finger lakes of Seneca and Cayuga, and he is the great (times six) grandfather of my two grandsons.

The War of 1812 is often overlooked, but in proportion to today’s population numbers, the American lives lost would tally 91,000 which is nearly 20 times the number killed in action as of last Sunday’s report during the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined which have already spanned four times a long.

Lewis Neeley, a likely abolitionist, was just a six-year old when his father John Neeley was killed in action; and 14 or 15 years before the outbreak of the Civil War he departed New York with his wife and children to ultimately settle in the Far West.

After losing his wife to illness on the bluffs of western Iowa as they overlook the Missouri River into Nebraska he caught a wagon train 161 years ago this month, along with his son Armenius who was one of my paternal great-great grandfathers, and traveled across the plains, then up and over the Great Divide to what Wallace Stegner later termed the Geography of Hope.

A Scarcity Of Water Nurtured My Social Mobility

Two months from today will mark 164 years since many of my ancestors crossed the Great Divide and settled in the west, before it had been carved into territories let alone states and into what Wallace Stegner termed “the geography of hope.”

The roots of my own upward social mobility aren’t found until 55 years after my ancestors arrived in the West and 46 years before I was born.  That’s  when Congress gave its approval to President Theodore Roosevelt’s first successful piece of legislation, The National Reclamation Act.

In part, this Act spurred both my paternal great-grandparents and grandfather (where he soon met my grandmother during a visit to see her sister) to move further north along the Great Divide to homestead the ranch and farmland later nurtured by my parents along the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River in the upper corner of the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Eastern Idaho.

The Act also helped make possible the introduction and union of my future parents when my watermaster maternal grandfather and his family relocated just a mile away in the 1940s to care for the now nearly 100-year-old Ashton Dam, currently under reconstruction.

Given to me by my daughter when she was in college and just after he died, I still have a description by Wallace Stegner capturing the West’s incredibly unique sense of place:

“Aridity more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.  It is aridity that gives the air its special dry clarity; aridity that puts brilliance in the light and polishes and enlarges the stars; aridity that leads the grasses to evolve as bunches rather than as turf; aridity that exposes the pigmentation of the raw earth . . .

In the attempt to compensate for nature’s lacks we have remade whole sections of the western landscape. We have acted upon (it) with the force of a geological agent. But aridity still calls the tune, directs our tinkering, prevents the healing of our mistakes; and vast un-watered reaches still emphasize the contrast between the desert and the sown. . . .

The primary unity of the American West is a shortage of water.”

Teddy Roosevelt, as President Abraham Lincoln did 40 years before by enabling the transcontinental railroad, understood as David Brooks writes, that projects like these were driven by “policies designed to give Americans an open field and a fair chance to spread the spirit of enterprise, enhance social mobility, and so built the nation.”

Stegner also wonderfully describes the spectacular mountain peaks that perpetually frame my native homeland memories:

“The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads.  They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies:  like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.”

As someone who spent nearly four decades place-making as an executive for community/destination marketing organizations in three different communities, two in the West and one, my home now for more than two decades, in Durham, North Carolina, I have a special appreciation of both Stegner’s beautiful articulation of place and the roots of my social mobility.

After all, “Home,” as Stegner wrote in his 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”